Integrated Humanities Program - A "Dean's Signature" Program

Fall Semester Courses

ENGS 027A ~ Literature of the Western Tradition

This course is a multidisciplinary survey of central texts of Homer, the Greek tragedians, Sappho, Greek Philosophy on art, Virgil, and Dante. It is presented in conjunction with IHP courses in Religion and History. The primary emphasis is on the traditions of reading and reimagining of the central range of texts from the Ancient and Medieval worlds. The purpose of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the texts and values of a liberal education, and to underscore the pervasiveness of Classical (and reinterpreted Classical) works and ideas as they persist into the modern world.

Requirements Satisfied: one Literature course

HST 013A ~ Ideas in the Western Tradition: Antiquity

This course surveys masterworks of literature, philosophy, and religion in the historical context of the ancient Greco/Roman world. We shall study the role of epic in oral tradition; the values espoused in Greek tragedy; the rise and fall of democracy in the Greek city-states; the appeal of Hellenistic religions with particular attention to Judaism and Christianity; ancient conceptions of time, tradition, and history; the civic ideals of the Roman Republic; and the Christian culture of the late Roman Empire. Readings include the epic of Gilgamesh, Greek tragedies by Sophocles and by Euripides, Aristotle's poetics, the Socratic dialogues of Plato, the history by Thucydides, the literary rendering of folklore by Apuleius, and essays by Seneca and by Augustine of Hippo. We shall also read selections from some modern interpretative studies: Nicholas Wade on human origins, Walter Ong on oral tradition, Elaine Pagels on Gnostic Christianity, Norman Cantor on ancient Judaism, the work of the Jesus seminar on the historical Jesus, and Paul Veyne and Peter Brown on the popular culture of the Roman Empire.

Requirements Satisfied: one Humanities course

REL 027A ~ Introduction to the Study of Religion: Roots of Self-Knowledge in the Greek and Hebraic Worlds

This course is an introduction to the study of religious and philosophical thought in Western culture from the formative perspective of the Greek and Hebraic worlds. As such, it focuses on their continuing implications in dealing with ultimate questions about the meaning of human existence. We will emphasize the search for human happiness and responses to human suffering, justice, love, law, and holiness, in dialogue with some of the great thinkers and texts of the humanities. Our purpose is to bring some of the most important thinkers and texts to bear upon our experience of the contemporary world. This class is a combination of lecture and discussion.

Requirements Satisfied: one Humanities course

Spring Semester Courses

ENGS 028 ~ Literature of the Western Tradition

This course offers students the opportunity to read major authors and significant books in the Western literary tradition, focusing on the development of the modern period. We will begin imaging of the formation of the modern world in Shakespeare's Hamlet and the beginning of Rationalism and the Scientific Revolution. The focus, however, will be on works from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century and Modernism, including authors such as Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. The major work of the semester will be Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. If time allows, we will sample a few films showing the emergence of cinema in the early twentieth century.

Requirements Satisfied: one Literature course

HST 014 ~ Ideas in Western Tradition

Working from a close reading of several key texts, this course will explore some of the main currents of European intellectual history from the eighteenth century to the present. We will examine themes such as social criticism in the Enlightenment period; reactions to the Industrial Revolution, from romanticism to utopian socialism; the rise of Marxism and classical sociological theory; the late-nineteenth-century "revolt against positivism"; and intellectual responses to the two catastrophic wars of the twentieth century. Particular attention will be devoted to the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, and Foucault.

Requirements Satisfied: one Humanities course

REL 028 ~ Religion, Philosophy, and the Search for Meaning in the Modern World

The aims of this course are to 1) Introduce students to new forms of thinking and reasoning in the modern and contemporary worlds. 2) Focus on those texts, thinkers, and ideas that have helped shape the modern and contemporary worlds, and to read texts that deal seriously with some of the most important issues of the modern and contemporary periods facing humanity. 3) Touch on thinkers and texts in IHP English and History that are relevant to our own course of study. There will be three papers assigned in the course. Two will be five to seven pages in length, and the third will be a final essay of approximately ten pages. The last essay may be done in conjunction with the IHP course on Literature or History.